The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  “Like being a writer of children’s stories,” she said, “instead of a true poet.” I wasn’t sure if that was quite what I’d meant—Margaret was very good at children’s stories, while I had no comparable achievement—but it felt close enough in sentiment. I was comforted to know that we shared a deficiency. This felt like something we could help each other out with, a shared goal that might foster a more symbiotic relationship than me just barging in whenever I needed time away from my own life. A possible clue as to why she was here. A possible beginning of a friendship.

  Margaret hadn’t been surprised to see us. She’d opened the door before I could knock, and now I was bouncing Clara in my arms, the two of us perched at the edge of the cigarette-burned chaise. The wall calendar read July 1947, a watercolor Dalmatian sniffing a daisy. Clara drooled onto my sleeve, and I considered using one of Margaret’s throw pillows to mop it. Her head lolled. I shifted myself awkwardly.

  “Would you like me to hold the baby?” asked Margaret. My first thought was to say no, not because she hadn’t yet made any effort to explain who she was, but because she was smoking. The message-board mothers reminded me regularly that secondhand smoke would increase the risk of SIDS, that even thirdhand smoke was dangerous. But in the 1940s, I assumed people smoked around their kids all the time, and for better or worse we had a whole generation of baby boomers who’d made out just fine. Well, this once.

  Crispian started barking once Margaret had Clara in her arms, jumping up and nipping her heels. His jealousy confirmed my suspicion that Margaret was choosing me.

  As long as I don’t feed Clara here, we’ll be okay, I told myself as Margaret swayed with her in front of the fire. I didn’t have any factual evidence to tell me this, just the story of Persephone eating the fruit that bound her to Hades, just instinct. Being a mother was all about instinct. Instinct: from the Latin for excited, but the aroused kind of excited, not the celebratory kind. A bunny ensnared in a trap, with an instinct to escape. Arousal: a tickling of the cunt.

  Once, when I was twelve, my mother called me a cunt. I was mad at her, and toasted all her mail in the open gas grill in the backyard. “You’re a cunt,” she’d said. Or maybe she said, “You’re acting like a cunt.” I could never really distinguish between “you are” and “you’re being,” and though I knew they were different in kind, it was the brusqueness of the word—the click at the back of my mother’s throat, the juicy tongue-to-roof n, the full-stop t—that truly mattered. Cunt: from the Latin for hollow, or wedge. From the Latin for woman.

  I admired Margaret’s brand of womanhood—carefree and individual, exciting and glamorous. It would be nice to have a strong female influence in Clara’s life, once Margaret and I solidified our friendship. In a few months Clara would presumably start paying attention, and I should consider what I wanted her to pay attention to. Obviously not my mother. At the moment, I, myself, was iffy. Annie might have been a strong female influence at one point, but she’d abandoned her commitment to adventure. Annie was getting overprotective, too parental, no fun. I felt like I could make myself adventurous, with some assistance. I could be free-spirited and glamorous—the kind of woman I’d have wanted as a mentor in my youth—if I just had some time to get myself together. If I just had a bit of space, somebody else to care for Clara.

  Before she was my father’s twenty-year-old girlfriend, Claudia Reid had been my babysitter. She let me use her lip gloss, and smelled like Boone’s Farm Apple Blossom, and drove a Jeep. She taught me how to pretend not to care when boys made fun of me. She taught me about Kurt Cobain. She didn’t like me very much, and I found that appealing. I needed someone like Claudia to take care of Clara while I figured myself out.

  “Do you babysit?” I asked.

  “I won’t let anybody get away with anything just because he’s little,” said Margaret.

  “That makes sense. Having rules for kids is good. So you’d be interested?”

  “I’m interested in people, and children are people. I don’t know that I like children, but I do understand them.”

  “What about babies?”

  “Babies are sweet.”

  I decided I would take this as a yes. This was a step in a desirable direction, both in my effort to matter to Margaret, and my effort not to matter quite so vitally to Clara. It could help both relationships to flourish.

  “I’d pay fifteen dollars an hour,” I said. The going rate was higher, but up here in the 1940s, fifteen dollars would get you much farther than it would downstairs in 2017. “I’d leave you milk in a bottle. You’d just have to be careful with the heat.”

  “The heat?”

  “The anger,” I said. “We can’t let it inside the house. This message board I follow says be careful. It’s already gotten into the garage, into the car, but we have to make sure that it stays there. It can’t come inside the apartment.”

  “Oh, the anger,” Margaret said. “That would be Michael. She can come off that way, you see. She likes to think of herself as a tempest, but she doesn’t really mean it.”

  “She doesn’t have to be so forceful.”

  “But she isn’t truly angry,” said Margaret. “She’s afraid. She’s sad. Her poetry has been neglected.”

  “It feels like anger to me.”

  MY PHONE BUZZED, and Clara and I said goodbye to Margaret and went down to meet Annie.

  “I thought you’d be here waiting for me,” she said, digging the new iteration of our spare key from her purse. “The car seat’s here, where were you?”

  “I was upstairs with the new neighbor.” I let Annie take Clara, unlocked the door, and held my hand out to Solly, who took one sniff and started skittering around the front hall. We must have still smelled like the zoo.

  “I didn’t know you had a new neighbor.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know much about her. I don’t even know her name.”

  “Which unit is she in?”

  I paused. There was no unit. Margaret would never condescend to a condo. A bohemian apartment, yes, a penthouse, an offbeat cabin, but no paint-by-numbers unit. Unit: from the Latin unitatem, sameness or agreement; a unit, a sole entity comprising part of a larger whole. Margaret was no group member. Margaret was unique. She stood up for what she wanted, which was why she could be Clara’s good influence. Margaret would have reminded her mother about the agreement to pay for zoo lot parking. She would have been proud to share news of herself to Annie, not afraid—as I was—that if I introduced her to Annie, she’d like Annie more than me.

  “Megan?” Annie was waiting for my answer. “Which unit?”

  “Upstairs,” I said. “Before the roof.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “It’s unclear.”

  “Megan,” said Annie, “sweetie.”

  My younger sister did not call me sweetie. Surely nobody had called anybody sweetie in the past fifteen years. The word made me think of sour Valentine’s Day candies, of lollipops that turned my lips blue. Have a sweetie. Be a dear. A deer in headlights. A rabbit in a trap.

  “Megan, have you been eating?”

  It was impossible to eat with a newborn—or at least to enjoy eating. I’d have Clara in one hand and a forkful of cold lasagna in the other. I spilled noodles on her swaddle, baptized her with marinara.

  “Maybe you should go out,” said Annie. “Get your nails done, get a massage. Do something for yourself.”

  “We could get drinks,” I said. A tequila bar had opened down the street, and in my last month of pregnancy I’d lurched myself past trendy haircuts and bicycle chains and little fake-flamed candles. Distressed wooden stools lined the bar, and a massive wagon wheel hung over the entrance, reminding me of a Catherine wheel. One of my cataloging jobs at the New York Public Library had been a video of a dance performance from the 1980s, a Twyla Tharp piece called The Catherine Wheel. It wasn’t really my sort of thing, but not
everything could be when you were archiving. I’d had the music in my head for weeks, and when I closed my eyes I’d picture this one strange, screaming dancer dressed up as a maid. I wasn’t really sure what the piece was about, but I had responded to Catherine as an icon. What was she the saint of, again? Education? One of my favorite parts of art history in college had been identifying saints based on their attributes. You could always find Catherine, carrying her wheel. Yoked.

  “Ben gets home on Sunday night. That’s not so long from now. I can be okay on my own tonight, if we do something tomorrow. If there’s tomorrow, and then Sunday to look forward to.” The implication, which I realized only after I’d spoken, was that I was depressed.

  “You have a sitter who you trust?” I could tell Annie thought this was a bad idea, and she was asking the question because she thought the answer was that I didn’t.

  “Yes,” I said, “a good one. She understands children.”

  Book Sales and the Zeitgeist

  Over the course of Margaret Wise Brown’s fifteen-year career, she published over one hundred books with dozens of publishers. She worked with almost every prominent illustrator of the day, and her accomplishments as an editor were paralleled only by those of Ursula Nordstrom, head of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973. At the time of her premature death in 1952, Brown was involved in a number of projects, including a collaboration with Alvin Tresselt, and a foray into songwriting.1 Today, her most popular book remains one of children’s literature’s best sellers. An estimated 49 million copies of Goodnight Moon have been sold worldwide since its first publication in 1947, with 13.5 million copies published just in the last ten years. The Runaway Bunny, Brown’s second most popular book, has sold 7.5 million copies.2 Brown’s impact on modern children knows no—

  9

  Clara was asleep when Margaret came downstairs. She knocked on the door, just like anyone else would. She walked in, but didn’t take off her shoes. I had just gotten out of the shower and was trying to choose between a maternity dress that hung like extra skin, and a pre-baby dress that clung too tight.

  “This one is nice,” said Margaret, pointing to the tight dress. It was a nice dress, one of my favorites, which meant I’d only worn it twice—once to a wedding, another time to dinner for my own wedding anniversary. An occasion-marking dress, which was why I’d laid it out. Leaving Clara was an occasion. But I didn’t want to feel fat in front of all the emaciated twenty-year-olds at the bar in their short skirts despite the weather, in front of the bartenders who’d probably seen me glassy-eyed and wandering with the stroller, in front of the Catherine wheel. The goal for the next two hours was to be Megan, not Mother. Funny how the things that had once made me feel like myself now did the opposite—the dress I could barely squeeze into, the curling iron, the patterned clutch. I’d been untethered from the objects of my former self, and this explained why I was flailing. Until I found some other stake to tie myself to, I’d be floating high on the helium, stuck in the space between who I’d been and who I would become. I had the makings of the new self: the bassinet, the diaper bag, the bottles, the pump. I just didn’t want to claim them.

  I put on the maternity dress, which at least still somewhat fit me, covered with a sweater that was possibly still in style. I braided my hair and finished my makeup in the downstairs bathroom while Margaret tried to bond with Solly, who ignored her, padding around to whine at me.

  “We don’t really have a schedule yet for Clara,” I said. “But I’ve written out when you should give her a bottle. And she usually poops while she’s eating.”

  “How endearing,” said Margaret. This was probably sarcasm, but I couldn’t be sure. I faked a laugh.

  “There’s just not much to do with them at this age,” I said, as if I knew.

  “At this age they see books as living objects,” said Margaret. She crouched down to assess Clara, in her bouncer.

  “You can read to her, if you want,” I said. “Or tell her stories.” I tried to imagine Margaret sitting with her skirt spread around her, pointing out primary colors. That wasn’t her style. She was more the sort to take Clara for a walk in the woods, tell her about the secret life of acorns or renegade bunnies. That could work, too, although for safety’s sake I hoped they would stay in our condo. “Any sort of educational indoor activity, really,” I said, and then I worried I was taking advantage. Margaret wouldn’t want to be my friend if I kept taking advantage. “I mean, you definitely don’t have to. You can also just watch TV.”

  I walked Margaret over to the fridge, showed her the bottles of pumped milk and how to warm them. “Here’s my cell phone number, and my sister’s number if I don’t pick up, and the number for the pediatrician. Can you leave me with some contact information? So if I need to, I can reach you? I’ll be just around the corner, but still.”

  She smiled. “Margaret Wise Brown,” she said. “New York City, sometimes Maine. You can reach me through my editor, Ursula Nordstrom.”

  ANNIE WAS WAITING at a high-top, twisting the toothpick garnish on her drink, scrolling through her phone. Although she was framed in the front window, I felt I was spying, seeing her before she saw me. She looked up when I dropped my purse next to her.

  “How was it leaving Clara with the babysitter?”

  “Like walking out the door without my heart,” I said, because I knew that was what I was supposed to say. I wasn’t supposed to say that it felt like a relief. “Like someone carved my heart out of my chest and then gave it to the babysitter.”

  “That’s a weird thing to say.” Annie scrunched her nose.

  I shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about the baby tonight,” I said. “Let’s talk about everything but the baby.”

  “Okay,” said Annie. We sat there in silence. The bar was playing the original John Prine version of “Angel from Montgomery,” which would have been a strange choice for a cocktail bar on a Saturday evening anywhere but here, in Logan Square, where what had been old and ugly was now new and beautiful.

  Annie sucked down the last of her mixed drink, and the slurp reminded me of being fourteen and sharing a waxy McDonald’s soda.

  “Easy there,” I said, and then immediately regretted it.

  Across the bar a man was looking at us, probably at Annie, but maybe at me. I twisted my wedding ring around so that the diamond was hidden against my palm, and when he held his hand up in a static hello, I gave him what I thought was a mysterious half smile. Of course I wasn’t going to cheat on Ben, of course this wasn’t going to go anywhere. But it was nice to feel like somebody was seeing me. Like I’d done myself up for a reason.

  When Annie went to get herself a second drink and me a first, the man slid off his bar stool and walked over to me. I couldn’t remember if I had brushed my teeth, though I supposed it didn’t matter. Even showered and perfumed, I smelled like milk.

  “I think I know you,” the guy said, holding up an index finger the way people do when they try to discern the direction of the wind. Was I North or South, a breeze or gusting? I didn’t recognize him.

  “You live down the block, in the condos by the 7-Eleven, right?”

  I nodded, attempting to place him. “Have we met? Sorry, my memory’s shot. I just had a baby.”

  “I know,” he said, “I saw you last week. Early morning.”

  “Sorry?”

  He mimed driving, and then taking off his shirt. When I still didn’t follow, he smiled. “You locked yourself out. I called the police.”

  “Mr. Garbage,” I said.

  “Ouch.” He grimaced, but didn’t seem offended.

  Annie came back with a mixed drink for herself and a glass of wine for me.

  “Mr. Garbage,” I said, “this is my sister.” Annie swatted at my hand under the table. I was being rude. “Mr. Garbage saved me from myself the other day,” I explained. “He’s the one who saved Clara.”

  “The guy who called the cops?” Annie held up her glass in a
solo toast. “You’re a hero. Let us buy you a drink.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt,” he said. “Just thought I’d come and say hello, see how you’re doing.”

  I didn’t like how Annie was smiling at him. He was attractive enough, if you liked stubbly and tattooed. I didn’t. His teeth weren’t straight, and he had buttons on the collar of his shirt, and he drove a garbage truck for a living. Was I being too judgmental? He’d seen me without a shirt, and now he was flirting with my sister.

  Annie introduced herself to Mr. Garbage, and I turned away, lightheaded after only a sip of wine. More wheels hung from the ceiling, dotted with lamplight. How did you die on a Catherine wheel, anyway? Did they pin you to the rim, or lace you in through the axle?

  “Megan,” said Annie, “Greg is talking to you.”

  “Who?” You’re a cunt. You’re acting like a cunt.

  “It’s fine,” said Mr. Garbage. “I should get going anyway. Good to see you.”

  I took another sip, and blinked.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” said Annie, slipping off the stool and walking with him back to his seat. She leaned in to him, explaining something. An infinitesimal feeling of loss, an urge to go to them, apologize. Annie was holding his phone, typing something into it. Mr. Garbage sat back down on his stool, and Annie made her way back to me.

  “We should probably just have one drink,” she said. “You seem . . . tired.” That was charitable.

  “I’m no fun,” I said flatly.

  “You’re not,” Annie agreed.

  “This was a good experiment,” I said. “This was a good thing to check off the list. We can do it again when Ben is home and I’ll feel better.” Probably this was true. Hopefully.

  “Okay.” Annie glanced over at Mr. Garbage, starting in on a beer. He wasn’t leaving. He’d lied to us. “Do you need me to walk back with you?”

  I knew that she wanted to stay with him, to maybe go home and fuck him in the house that garbage built, to get naked and put on his orange hat and massive silver headphones.